In 2019, I put on a concert called “music for august” at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Memphis. The program consisted completely of music I had written. On the program was a piece I wrote for violin and electric bass, inspired by Chick Corea’s own series of Children’s Songs. I wrote the piece specifically for bassist Sam Shoup and I to play. It was premiered by myself and Gunter Gaupp, a friend and composer, who also lent me his bass so I could write it since I didn’t own one myself. Gunter jumped in to play last-minute, so we only played the first movement as we didn’t have the time to rehearse the second.

I was inspired to write a two-movement work because of some of the Mozart violin sonatas. I remember when I started playing through them, the two-movement idea was fascinating – it seemed like he wasn’t writing just for the sake of hearing himself write; this is perhaps one of the tropes that bothers me the most about some other composers of the time, and a trope that I try to avoid most in my own music. In two movements, you have to be efficient, and there’s no pressure to “fill” a third with things you wouldn’t otherwise if you didn’t have to write one.

The second movement, “Battle of Mr. Finale” is a tongue-in-cheek joke I had with Sam through his university jazz arranging class about the Finale engraving software, constantly crashing and just generally being ornery and unpleasant to be around, I said that upon… meeting Mr. Finale, I would simply ask him “why.”

In the following summer, of 2020, I wanted to release the piece along with a few other compositions on a full album. At that point, I think I completely lost my mind. Covid had forced me to move back out of New York, just months after I had arrived. The world in the spring and summer of 2020 was not a good place to live. Outside of covid, the US was in turmoil. I felt like the sky was falling. That energy took me away from focusing on practicing, and instead on the idea of creating. I think it was something that felt more real – even if I didn’t survive the year, a recording could be there forever. 

I had been talking with Jake Allen, fingerstyle guitarist, songwriter and singer. We had intended to go on tour through the summer of 2020, through the Midwest and eventually ending in California. As the news progressed each week, it became clear that wasn’t happening. We never actually discussed that the tour was cancelled, we just both understood.

His own release that I had flown to Michigan to record on a few weeks before “music for august” was in limbo anyway since the release tour had been cancelled. We spoke about me doing this album: I had told him about the bass piece, I had been working through it with Sam in-between our tracking sessions. Jake told me about Michael Manring, whom he had worked with previously. The first email he wrote to both of us about this project was August 10th, 2020. I had, by that point, scrapped the plans for the EP and instead just focused on getting a single, “Billings.” I hoped to come back to Children’s Songs later.

Michael and I continued to write to each other, sometimes it would be months in-between my replies to his latest attempts because the pressures of school and life would take over. I didn’t consider this project to be especially important – I didn’t feel like it was as “serious” as getting all the notes together for other things. Plus, there was no real deadline, unlike almost everything else.

According to the email chain, we finished up the first movement around July of 2021. In August of 2021, I sent over the lead sheet to “Mooncat.” Neither the world at large nor my own had improved, but in the spring of 2021 I had regained some of myself and decided to continue. I had the melody of Mooncat stuck in my head for a while. There’s a subtle quote to Sam Shoup’s song “Dog Police” he recorded with the eponymous group.

I knew in early 2023 that if I didn’t finish this project in 2023, I just wouldn’t. I had been sitting on Michael’s recordings for a while, I think mostly out of fear that I wouldn’t play the way I wanted to. I wrote to him in April of 2023, in the middle of a few busy weeks. I had the idea that I would put these three tracks on an EP, and then add a fourth track, “Laika.”

Laika was an idea I had from the album experimenting in 2020. It didn’t have any name originally; it came from me experimenting with some guitar pedals one day (I had really lost it). There was one, a harmonizer, that could do a bunch of neat things, it could play stacked fifths in the same way the strings of the violin are tuned, it was like I was playing on all the strings at the same time. I recorded a quick demo and sent it to Jake. It sat for a very long time, but I would think about it sometimes. I decided to call it Laika and add it in to this EP, fitting in with the cosmic theme. It felt sad, self-reflective. I didn’t flesh it out or start writing the score until a few days before the recording session, it had just existed in my head.

The recording was set to take place in August of 2023, in Memphis. Things didn’t quite work out to plan, to say the least – changing venues, delays. I was worn out by the end and it was sub-par. I tried to salvage things in editing for months, ultimately why I’m releasing this in January 2024 instead of August 2023 as the article says. I ended up having to re-record things in London. This was a good decision, but for four tracks it seems draining to have spent this much time and effort on it.

Laika is covered in hidden meanings, probably most of which will go unnoticed. There’s a quote from a piece I wrote for violin and piano, the single-movement Violin Sonata, which has never been recorded or performed outside of the “music for august” concert in 2019. The final section of the music is kind of an homage to Holst’s Neptune from The Planets, with the choir fading away into the back of the hall. I replaced his chords with three-note outlines of unsettling diminished chords, but the same first notes of the first movement of the Children’s songs, what Michael plays to open the EP. I think for me these touches subconsciously gave me an opportunity to express some kind of grief that I hadn’t been able to properly mourn, tying things all the way back to that concert in 2019, a hard-fought closing of the book, finally, I head into the sun, I can be at peace.

Special thanks to Gunter Gaupp, Jake Allen, Michael Manring, Calvin Lauber, Felix Dickenson, Andrew Lang, Barra Liddy, Sean Winfrey, Michael Donahue, JW, SS, SS, CG, MW, KI, JF, BA.

Available everywhere January 30th

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